Johanna von Hofe ’00: In the Ninth Ward in New Orleans,
by Amanda Lanzl ’00

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The author, left, with her friend and the subject of this article.


Johanna Von Hofe’s fifth grade class in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward is enthusiastic about math. Her twenty-nine African-American students are excited about rounding numbers. In unison, they rap:


Find the value and circle the digit,
Move to the right and underline it,
0 to 4 stays the same,
5 to 9 add 1 to the game.
Now flex your muscles like a hero,
Digits to the right turn to zero,
All the other numbers stay the same,
Man, you’re a winner at the rounding game!

The school’s assistant principal walks into the classroom and listens as the students rap, boldly shouting out the last line. Raising her eyebrows, she turns to the young teacher and says, “Miss Von Hofe, I think you’ve got it.”

Fighting to Prove Herself
When Johanna accepted a position with Teach for America (TFA) on her graduation from Duke University in May 2004, she anticipated a difficult but rewarding experience. TFA is an organization devoted to “the elimination of educational inequity” through the placement of its “corps members in 22 urban and rural areas in low-income communities” at public schools across the United States (www.teachforamerica.org). With New Orleans public schools ranked among the nation’s worst, TFA New Orleans was widely regarded as one of its toughest assignments.

Johanna’s motivation to join the TFA corps of bright, recent college graduates stemmed from “a keen, first-hand awareness of the importance of education and a desire to help afford New Orleans’ students some of the educational opportunities and experiences that I was fortunate enough to have.” She never imagined, however, just how hard her first year of teaching would turn out to be.

The challenges and frustrations she encountered throughout her first year far outnumbered the intermittent moments of gratification and satisfaction. The Title I school had been built for 300 students from prekindergarten through grade 7 and was now crammed with 950. The facilities were in grave disrepair. A blacktop without equipment served as the playground.

Johanna fought to keep her students invested and engaged, to ensure adequate classroom resources, to heighten parental involvement, to get through her carefully crafted daily lesson plans. As a young white teacher in an all-black school, she fought to prove herself to parents who questioned whether their children could learn from a white instructor. But most of all, she fought to remain in control of her classroom.

The Challenges of Discipline
Johanna recalls, “My kids cursed, refused to sit in their seats, much less work, defaced books, beat each other up, and threw things across the room at each other. One even peed in her desk chair when I wouldn’t excuse her to the restroom. It was on the order of Dangerous Minds, but these kids are 10 and 12 years old.”

To manage defiant students, Johanna employed the traditional disciplinary tactics she learned over the course of her fiveweek
summer program in Houston, TX. She created independent and group behavioral modification plans, introduced incentives for positive behavior, and solicited parental involvement.

When I saw Johanna over her Christmas break, she offered many anecdotes, but one, about the striking and absurd methods used by the school’s security guard, stands out in my mind. To prevent a misbehaving student sent out of the classroom from running off and causing more disruption in the hallways, the guard, who carried pairs of handcuffs on his belt, would lock and secure one handcuff around his belt, and the other around the wrist of the disobedient student. According to Johanna, “he could have a line of three students on either side of him at recess, all linked and chained together by sets of handcuffs, yelling at passersby or following him without protest.”

In spite of the challenges Johanna faced, she and her students persevered. She passed twenty-eight out of twenty-nine of her students, allowing all but one to move up to the sixth grade. Despite her success, over the summer of 2005 Johanna debated whether to return to New Orleans. She reflected, “My first year teaching was the hardest year of my life. I didn’t know if I could
survive another one.” But Johanna ultimately resolved to return to her school and to a brand new class of fifth-graders.

On August 18, 2005, Johanna started her second year of teaching in New Orleans. She was able to draw on her first-year experiences, to anticipate challenges, to set her own and student expectations early. The first ten days of the new school year progressed relatively smoothly.

Johanna explained, “My students were behaving. My lessons plans were more complete, and I wasn’t up in the weehours of the morning trying to figure out ‘What the heck am I going to do with those kids tomorrow?’ We were having a pretty good time.”

Hurricane Causes Change of Jobs
Then Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005, devastating the city and flooding Johanna’s school. Johanna was able to evacuate before the hurricane struck, but watched the news in horror as the levees broke. TFA offered to relocate her to another city, another teaching position. But for Johanna, returning to New Orleans was not a question of “if,” but “when” and “how soon.”

TFA searched for ways to use the talents of their now jobless public school teachers who were interested in returning to the devastated area. Some teachers took new assignments in New Orleans’ surrounding parishes and even in Houston, Texas. TFA also contracted some New Orleans corps members to work for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

On September 26, Johanna joined FEMA at a Disaster Recovery Center (DRC) located 50 miles from New Orleans in Vacherie, LA. Johanna worked as the FEMA Housing Lead through late December. She managed the housing assistants who meet with and guide hurricane victims through the process and the paperwork of applying for financial assistance.

Johanna was shocked and saddened by “how helpless some of the people are who seek aid from FEMA. Many people have no idea what questions to ask and what information is important to provide just to get started on the road to recovery. It’s a combination of a lack of resources and a lack of education.” For her first three weeks at FEMA, Johanna worked 8 a.m. – 7 p.m., seven days a week. For the last two months, she worked 7:30 a.m. – 7 p.m., six days a week, and relished her one, well deserved day off.

Johanna describes her work at FEMA as both “frustrating and empowering.” She explains, “It is incredibly rewarding when an applicant who has come in on a daily basis saying, ‘How can you help me?’ finally returns and says, ‘Thank you. My life is better because of the work you did for me.’”

After finishing her work with FEMA in December, Johanna returned to Greenville to spend the holidays with her family. She spent January traveling around Peru, then went on a mission trip with her church to the Dominican Republic, and has now returned to New Orleans where she looks forward to watching the city rebuild.

On Thanksgiving Day this year, an eclectic group joined Johanna at her house in New Orleans. Around the table sat her parents, a TFA colleague, a former (now sixth-grade) student, and two hurricane evacuees she met and helped while working at FEMA. I suspect that all of them gave thanks in some measure to their host, for her caring, compassion, dedication, and belief in the power of education.

Author's Note:
Since graduating from Duke University in 2004 with a degree in Public Policy and a certificate in Markets and Management, Amanda Lanzl has been living in Arlington, VA, and working as a consultant for Accenture, a global management consulting and technology services firm. She is enjoying life in Washington, DC, where she has had the opportunity to reconnect with many of her CCES and Duke classmates.